Using Twitter Right: Basic DOs and DONTs (part 3)

Here is a new DO and DONT about Twitter to help you promote your books on this social media. This one is focused on the content of your tweets. Being a writer doesn’t mean you know what to write in every communicating circumstances but you’ll see that it is still a major asset in tweet writing. You maybe think:

“As a Twitter thread scrolls rapidly in front of users, I need to increase their chance to see that my book is on sale. To do so, I’ll just post every six hours the same tweet: buy my great book for only 1,99”

Once again, every part of this sentence is wrong.

A Twitter thread passes rapidly in front of users. WRONG. Yes it passes rapidly but here is how the Twitter thread reading goes:

Scroll...Scroll...Scroll

Stop..."Oh that looks interesting" ... Click

Skim reading... "Yup, I'll take 3 minutes to read it" OR "Nope">close

So basically each reader will have some profiles they notice and pay attention to their tweet and keywords they’ll stop scrolling for because they feel involved in the subject. (hashtags are useful there because they stand out in the normal text: they are better identified when just scrolling down to find interesting content)

I need to increase their chance to see that my book is on sale.WRONG. You need people to take an interest in you and your product, not merely to be informed that you have a product on sale.

I’ll just post every six hours the same tweet. WRONG. While scrolling down, I can assure you Twitter users will immediately identify the “automated post” and know that it isn’t added value for them. Their brain will even probably just block all content coming from your profile just because they had once or twice the bad experience of reading “automated tweets”.

Buy my great book for only 1,99. WRONG. If you read part 1 and 2 of this blog series, you already know that’s wrong 🙂

Third DO of using Twitter: Share personal content in a professional way

Twitter is full of two major mistakes: people thinking “business is business” so posting only strictly professional information content, in a very official way like:

Yes, that’s a real tweet, because from time to time professional business-only tweets are also good.

Or people reading somewhere that they should be personal so sharing constantly their opinion of the meal they had (or other personal events of their lives that nobody cares about):

People will find an interest in your tweets if they feel they get to know you professionally (they don’t need to know your cat’s name): share your professional evolution, struggles, achievements, etc. Show that you’re a human working not just a selling machine or a random human.

Your tone should be personal in the sense that you shouldn’t sound like an advertising robot, not in the sense that you should talk like you would with your BFF (for instance, avoid using “words” like BFF…)

Sharing events of your personal life can be a tool to help your follower feel included but be careful of the way you do it. (I’ll probably write a whole blog post specifically on tone later in the series.)

Third DON’T of using Twitter: Is publishing the same tweet more than once really worthy of your writer’s status?

I see it so many times on Twitter, I can’t really believe it: authors promoting their books on Twitter by posting the same tweet over and over and over and over…. until death do us part (or until me blocking their content do us part…)

Yes, it is good to regularly remind your twitter followers that they can buy your book somewhere but don’t post the same tweet twice. You are a writer, looking for others ways to say things is part of the job.

Don’t forget that putting the link to buy your book can be the call to action to a tweet content more valuable than “my book is for sale” such as elements of the story, description of a character, excerpt of a reader’s review, a glimpse of the synopsis, etc.

From these, I hope you’ll start to see the billions of possibilities of content to put in a tweet. If not, don’t hesitate to say so in the comments or on social medias!